Tempest in a Voicemail

The leading argument this weekend seems destined to be over voicemail. Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington kicked things off with his own anti-voicemail blog entry. Based on his own experiences and a survey of folks on Friendfeed, he condemns voicemail as being a nuisance and a disruption of the daily workflow.

Personally, I think it’s too soon to pronounce the death of voicemail; I know I end up leaving, and listening to, voice messages every week. Perhaps in certain small areas, or sectors where email has 100% penetration, text beats voice. But out here in the heartland, even a full-time web worker can’t do without a way to communicate asynchronously with people who aren’t emailable.

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How about you? Are you ready to turn your voicemail off? Are you looking for some service (like one of the speech-to-text companies, or visual voicemail) to make it more manageable? Or are you content with the way things are now?

Definitely Youmail for me too. I’m addicted to the reverse lookup for unknown callers and the MP3 attachments. I don’t use the feature that can hang up on selected callers (ditch mail) but use it when i travel. I wish they’d have a feature that can choose different greetings based on time of day.
Oh, and i saved over $200 by checking my voicemails online when i was in germany a few weeks ago.

Youmail.com has been the best solution for avoiding voicemail. I wish my company would use it. It sends the voicemail as an mp3 attachment into your email. You can also do custom greetings based on who calls.

Tons of ways to get your messages. I have a custom voice message and get all voicemails in an
email with
voice to text,
caller id,
and an audio attachment of the message I can open in my blackberry media player and listen to if I want.

And it is free although texting charges, etc. depend on your phone carrier plan.

Sooner or later it doesn’t matter. Jott and similar services will eventually overcome the speech to text barrier. I have used both Callwave and Youmail. I keep going back to Callwave because I get the transcripted text in my e-mail and to SMS. In the end it doesn’t matter

I hate voicemail, The only time I ever miss timely, important information is when someone leaves it for me as a voicemail only. After reading Arrington’s post I looked at the companies doing voicemail transcription and decided to go with Phonetag to start.

Intensely dislike voicemail. It’s disruptive, quality always drops just as the vmailer is leaving their number, and most vmailers leave completely pointless vm’s.
If you need to put something on my mobile, text it to me – I don’t have to go through a whole process to access it.
Never leave them myself, and usually just delete mine in one go…

I compromised in the middle. I switched to SpinVox (voice-to-text service) so I get my voice mails as messages. It’s not perfect but it’s much better than listening to endless people blab on. Those who want to leave a message do. Those who don’t, send mails. I get everything in my in-box as readable text.

Visual Voicemail on my iPhone is great. I still think people need voicemail. It’s also much easier sometimes to say things then to type them. I can’t stand ‘old’ voice mail and love the fact I can fast forward, which I use all the time. It still fits certain people, especially the not-so-technical client. For me, Visual Voicemail is the way to go to keep everything organized and easily manageable, even if that means just deleting it without a listen.

I haven’t used voicemail for years. I don’t see it as a nuisance or a disruption, I simply don’t like it, so I don’t use it. I can see how it can be construed as a nuisance though. If its important, people will call back.

I whole heartedly agree with Martijn and Mike @ TC. I am to the point where I just simply do not listen to messages. I would like to just turn off voicemail – the only advantage being that it stops the annoying ringing after only 4 rings. I would love an announce only outgoing message. Voicemail is dead to me.

The past week I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to stop using my voicemail.
Will I just disable it (I think I can do that with my provider), leave a message saying people should mail me or say that they should simply text me?
I’m not sure where the right answer lies for me, but I *am* sure that, for me, voicemail is dead.